“The whole system is greased to pay hospitals and others for expensive things people might not even want” at the end of life, says Dr. Lachlan Forrow, director of ethics and palliative care at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston.

“It’s impossible not to ration, it’s irrational not to ration, and it’s unethical not to ration” medical care at the end of life, says this professor of ethics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health.

Actor Martin Sheen says his new movie about the Camino de Santiago is ultimately about “a journey of the spirit as well as the flesh” as well as a search for ritual and transcendence.

"If anything is covered by separation of church and state, this is it,” says lawyer Douglas Laycock, who argued for the Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church and School, and nearly 100 diverse religious groups filed briefs supporting a church’s right to choose its own ministers.

“Now we have only 5,000 Jews all over India, and in Delhi we have only five, six Indian Jewish families. We are like a drop in the ocean,” says Ezekiel Malekar, keeper of Delhi’s tiny synagogue.

Actress Vera Farmiga plays a woman who is “wrestling with the Lord and refusing to let him go until she understands and until he blesses her,” says writer and author Frederica Mathewes-Green.

The September 30 killing in Yemen of radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is reigniting an ethical debate: Should the US use armed drones outside combat zones? Watch excerpts from recent interviews on drones and the ethics of war.

Catholic Charities in Illinois refuses to accept same-sex couples for adoption or foster parenting. Should the state, which recognizes civil unions, withdraw its funding of the charity?

“The way we spend our money is ultimately one of the greatest signs of our moral convictions,” says Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz.

Religious leaders have joined civil rights activists, the Justice Department, and others in challenging Alabama's tough new immigration law. "The government is trying to tell us what we can or can’t do in terms of works of mercy, works of charity, which are fundamental to our faith," says Father ...

“There is acute embarrassment that the second-fastest growing economy in the world has almost half of its children malnourished,” says Biraj Patnaik.

“Church groups, mosque-related groups, synagogue-related groups—it’s not necessarily their mission to go and promote water security, but if it’s their mission to help their neighbors, which it always is, then we’re going to have to think hard about how we’re going to work together,” ...

“When Muslims want to respectfully dispose of a text of the Qur’an that is no longer usable, we will burn it,” says Imam Jihad Turk, director of religious affairs at the Islamic Center of Southern California.

“Have we healed? Yes, healed with a hole. It’s never a complete healing, but at least there a willingness to write a new chapter of life,” says Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, a New York Fire Department chaplain.

“The people who are paying the costs, military families, veterans, civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—those people deserve to have their story told,” says Professor Catherine Lutz of Brown University.

“You’re not tolerant,” says this Christian philosopher, “if you're indifferent. You're tolerant if you disapprove of the other person's religion but put up with it nonetheless."

“We think of 9/11 every day,” says Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights. “All you do when it comes to the anniversary, you try to look back and say have I made a difference?”

College and university students recall 9/11 and reflect on how it affected their spiritual lives.

The past decade may have brought Americans new interfaith understanding, but it has also expanded interfaith tensions.

"This decade has been a time of encountering and engaging Islam in a new way that also causes Christians to think about their own identities and understand God and God's love for people beyond the Christian world," says Notre Dame history professor Scott Appleby.